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## Replication Files for “Academic Freedom Growth and Decline Episodes”

Journal: Higher Education

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-023-01156-z

Link: <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01156-z>

Author: Lars Lott

Correspondence: Lars Lott, Friedrich-Alexander-University
Erlangen-Nürnberg (<lars.lott@fau.de>)

Date: December 13rd, 2023

Required Software: R and RStudio (4.2.3 or Above).

Additional required software packages and libraries are specified in the
replication code.

#### Overview

These files replicate all analyses presented in “Academic Freedom Growth
and Decline Episodes”, Higher Education
<https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01156-z>

To replicate all analyses and figures, download all data files to a
folder entitled “~/data”, create a second folder entitled “~/results” in
the same directory, and run all code files in numerical order. Create
also a third folder named “~/figures” in the same directory to store all
graphical outputs. In addition, you can use the Rproject file to
automatically handle the file paths

The article titled “Academic Freedom Growth and Decline Episodes” uses
an episode approach to learn about academic freedom growth and decline
episodes worldwide between 1900 and today. To produce these episode
dataset, you can use the companion R package “EpisodeR” avaiable under
<https://github.com/LarsLott/EpisodeR>.

#### Replication Code

01_generate_episodes_dataset.R Repliactes the data wrangling process and
esimates the main dataset including the *Academic Freedom Growth and
Decline Episodes dataset*. Replicates Table 1 and Figure 1 to Figure 6.

02_data_analysis.R Replicates all main Diff-in-Diff regression analyses
presented in the paper, including all Figures 6 to 9.

03_bfa.R Replicates the data wrangling process and the Bayesian factor
analysis (BFA) model to construct the four-item academic freedom index.
The BFA model takes approximately 24 hours to converge. A pre-processed
data file named “academic_freedom_index_cy.rds” can be used for all
other scripts. Then, user can skip running 03_bfa.R

04_appendix.R Replicates all analyses as well as all robustness tests
presented in Supplementary Appendix.

##### R Functions

All following R files are helper functions to get the *Academic Freedom
Growth and Decline Episodes dataset* and are also part of the EpisodeR R
Package available here: <https://github.com/LarsLott/EpisodeR>. These
fucntions are loaded in the respective R-file when used.
get_episode_function.R

get_episode_function_wo_CI.R

get_episode_function_wo_CI_four_item.R

plot_all_episode.R

plot_episodes_function.R

#### Data files (relative path “~/data”)

Replication data: -bayes.academic_freedom_index_cd.rds: country-date
four-item academic freedom index data
-bayes.academic_freedom_index_cy.rds: country-year four-item academic
freedom index data all data files that are necessary for running
1_academic_freedom_index_construction.R -ert.csv: Episodes of Regime
Transformation data (based on version V-Dem version 13) -vdem13.rds:
Varieties of Democracy data, version 13

#### Output results (relative path “~/results”)

Store results (e.g. BFA estimates)

#### Output tables (relative path “~/tables”)

Store tables

#### Output figures (relative path “~/figures”)

Store figures
